


it don't come in a shot glass

by cracktheglasses (cormallen)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Kylo is a horrible neighbor but he gives great head, Kylux 2016 May Fic Exchange, M/M, Minor Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 09:31:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6652450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cormallen/pseuds/cracktheglasses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo hates his job, his life, his hot neighbor Hux, cats, turning thirty, and everything, not necessarily in that order.</p><p>Well, maybe cats -- and Hux -- are OK. Whatever. Being thirty still blows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it don't come in a shot glass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Goober](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goober/gifts).



> I hope you like it, Giftee! I went mostly with your first prompt (and pulled a little from the third), and did my best to fit in a bunch of your likes! 
> 
> Title from Amy Winehouse's Rehab. 
> 
> [@machinewithoutfeelings](http://machinewithoutfeelings.tumblr.com/), you are the best! Thank you for all the hand-holding! And [@wyomingnot](http://wyomingnot.tumblr.com), thank you for being a gracious and reassuring captive audience!

“Oh, my gosh,” says the woman at 7-11. “What happened to your face?”

Kylo stares at her nametag as he hands her his debit card, raised little letters spelling out ‘Judy’ on her dark red shirt.

“Pack of American Spirits Organic -- no, the one on the left -- the dark blue,” he says, and waits a beat. “What do you mean, what happened to my face?”

It’s a thing he’s picked up from a work advice blog, the one he reads at his desk when it’s quiet, and clocks as professional development. It’s about work. It counts. Probably. He’d found it late last year, when he’d googled “how to resist urge to murder coworker who whistles all the fucking time”, and clicked on the first link, _now displaying results for_ ‘coworker who whistles’, _missing ‘_ resist’, ‘murder’, ‘fucking’”.

Mitaka quit before Kylo ever had a chance to address the near-constant wheeze and squeak of Alouette, Frere Jacques and Rolling in the Deep, but the rest of the advice proved surprisingly useful. How to deal with being voluntold. How to gracefully stop participating in the office birthday cake and card extravaganza. This one’s technically supposed to be about stopping inappropriate jokes, but Kylo’s found it’s really pretty great at deflecting all kinds of verbal bullshit.

Step one. Pretend you don’t get it. Check.

Step two. Ask for clarification.

“Oh, is there something on my face?” he asks, rubbing quickly at his left cheek, then the right, with the heel of his hand. Over the counter, the woman goes uncomfortably pink.

“No, I just meant -- I’m sorry. That’s going to be eight dollars and four cents, sir -- debit, or credit?”

Step three. Let them hang themselves and enjoy their discomfort. The advice didn’t exactly say ‘enjoy’, but what the hell. If he can’t enjoy someone else’s discomfort for a change, why even bother. He might as well have just let her ask about the scar.

As far as Kylo is concerned, all the people he meets now fall neatly into two categories: those who stare, and those who ask how he got it. Sometimes, he isn’t quite sure which he hates more. The starers, who probably think they’re being polite as all that by not accosting a perfect stranger in the Price Chopper aisle, blinking away as soon as he turns, fiddling with a shopping list or suddenly needing that super important piece of pocket lint. At the goddamn Showcase, not ballsy enough -- or maybe not interested enough -- to actually ask, but whispering to each other over their rubbery popcorn, quick side eye glances before the previews start. In the fucking line at the Beanery, those are probably the worst, because he’s in there just about every day, so he _owes_ them now, him and his messed up face, like their shared coffee place makes them some kind of familiar, close enough to lean over and say, “shit, what happened to the other guy,” and maybe that’s a little better than the pinched, sympathetic lip droop and the “oh, hon, that must’ve _hurt_ ”.

No shit, Kylo thinks every time, grabbing a napkin and change from the leave-a-penny. And water is wet, and the sky is blue, and having half a mile of road embedded in your cheek hurts like a bastard; he’s lucky he only lost two teeth, and was still on his mother’s insurance when it happened, because there’s no way his work plan would’ve covered the implants.

He taps the cigarette pack against the back of his wrist and peels off the cellophane, letting it crinkle down to the floormat, but hesitates before he starts the car. He pulls down the shade instead, stares at the slivers of nose and cheek reflected in the mirror. It’s really not anywhere near as bad as it used to look, he thinks, and traces the pale white spiderweb with the tip of a finger. It pinkens and widens out as it zigzags his nose, ending almost at his eye; the surgeons said that was lucky as well, no corneal damage. Small favors, Kylo sighs, pulls a cigarette out of the pack, lights it and takes a deep hungry drag, the cherry glowing red between his fingers, thick curl of smoke twisting up to the roof of the car.

The Honda makes an angry, shrill noise when he finally turns the key in the ignition, something complaining at him from deep within its oily metal guts. He should probably have that looked at, but rent’s due in two weeks, and Han will probably insist on checking it out anyway, like he always does, and fuck, Kylo thinks, that’s tomorrow, and hits his fist into the steering wheel. It creaks sullenly, and Kylo hits it again, feels the car swerve a little just over the double yellow.

Fuck.

It’s probably too late to ask his parents to call the whole thing off, he thinks as he pulls into the lot and unlocks the door to his building. The stairwell smells like fish and fried grease, and the light in the hallway is blinking again, a rough neon buzz; Kylo grabs the pile of mail from out of his box and walks up the stairs to his apartment.

He’s gotten used to how empty it feels. To shutting the door behind him and not having to say, hey, you, and to the grooves worn into the carpet where he hasn’t replaced the shelf or the loveseat. Most of the time, he sits on the floor, anyway, or stretches out on the bed, all his, no sharp elbows or knees in the way, and as many pillows as he wants for the taking. It’s really not half-bad; not anymore, and isn’t that how it fucking goes, because now that he’s used to it, he gets the dubious privilege of rearranging it all over again.

He throws his coat over the kitchen table and pulls a can of UFO from the fridge. He likes it better in the bottles, but beggars can’t be choosers, and he really shouldn’t have it in either, all things considered. He pops the top and flips through the mail as he drinks, the beer foamy and perfectly cold and bitter-sweet.

Cell phone bill. Cable bill -- this one he shouldn’t be getting anymore, he’s pretty sure; he canceled that right after Alec moved out, no point to keeping HBO without the near-endless litany of _in the books, her name’s actually Asha_  and _that is so not how shit went down in the Vale_. He should probably call Time Warner, but Rey might decide she wants to chip in for it, and Kylo decides to postpone that until she’s well and moved in. Not like one more day’s going to make or break him.

The next envelope in the stack is a subscription renewal notice for Accounting Today, and Kylo stares at it dumbly before flipping through to the thing underneath, a folded up copy of the SmartBrief on Leadership newsletter, addressed to B. Hux, Jr., and of fucking course. The post office gods have blessed him with his downstairs neighbor’s mail again, and Kylo savagely rips open Hux’s next three letters -- a vet appointment reminder in infuriating Comic Sans, complete with a cartoon parrot on the front, a statement from Aetna Vision, and Hux’s paystub, quickly scanning through to the total.

Fantastic. Apparently Hux has gotten a raise, or maybe this is a bonus, because now it looks like he’s making almost three times what Kylo does in a week. He’s also switched to AirOptix contacts, and needs to vaccinate something named Millicent, probably the obnoxiously orange cat Kylo sees pressed up against the window glass sometimes, staring at the hanging birdfeeder like it’s heaven, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Kylo takes another swig of beer, sweeps up all of the mail, his own included, and shoves it into the trash, shutting the lid on it with a vague, watery feeling of satisfaction. Hux probably gets all of the notifications in his e-mail anyway, prints his paystubs right from Intuit or whatever his office uses instead, and nobody, but _nobody_ , needs a newsletter topped with an article called Failure: The Best Confidence-Building Exercise You Never Expected.

Not like Hux knows from failure, anyway, Kylo thinks, and crushes his empty beer can between his palms, feels the aluminum edges impressing into his skin. He’s still thinking about Hux when he finally turns the lights out and has the sheet pulled up almost all the way to his chin, two pillows wedged into the uncomfortably large space between him and the wall.

Hux turned 34 last year, and works at Thanisson & Radomski Accounting, both of which Kylo only knows due to the vagaries of the USPS, whose inability to tell apart numbers borders sometimes on the absurd. Kylo lives in 490; Hux in 290, two floors below, and yet his mail finds its way into Kylo’s box with startling regularity. The first time, Kylo opened the thick manila envelope from the University by accident; it looked like something they’d send alumni, probably asking for money, or showing off money they’d received, and he perused it idly, trying to think of the most creative and satisfying way to tell them to shove it before he finally saw the name ‘Brendan’ and ground to a complete stop. Sure, it wasn’t like anything the alumni relations people would send him was going to be addressed to Kylo, but there was still a long way between Ben Organa-Solo and Brendan Hux, Jr. -- it’s the Jr. that finally made him cringe, like the name ‘Brendan Hux’ was that fucking spectacular that it deserved to be bestowed on more than one person.

He sealed the envelope back up, pushing the little metal stays through the flap, fully meaning to put it into 290s mailbox on his way to work the next day, but then he overslept, hit the snooze three too many times and ended up taking the stairs at a run, still buttoning his shirt collar. He forgot on the way back, and the morning after that it was raining and Kylo had his hands full with refillable mug, bag, umbrella, car keys. That evening he grabbed the letters from his own mailbox, only to find Hux’s registration renewal form from the town of Mansfield and a copy of his Visa bill with a higher credit limit than seemed fair when he finally went through them later. He thought of trudging dutifully back downstairs to slide those back into the appropriate slot, or maybe knocking on Hux’s door himself, but he was already on his fourth IPA, the bottles lining up on the coffee table like little soldiers, and Alec was looking at him, nastily pinch-lipped; a few more days after that, it seemed like it was already too weird and too late.

It’s not that he _hates_ him, Kylo thinks, rolling from his side to his back, the cool swish of cotton settling back over him. It’s just that Hux has everything so _together_. Sure, he may live in the same 60s building, with the leaky pipes in the basement and the avocado green tile in the bath and the asbestos waiver he’d have to have signed along with the lease, but unlike Kylo, he doesn’t need his cousin, a decade younger and barely an adult by any standards, to move in and shoulder half the rent. Hux is alone in his two-bedroom by design, and Kylo knows -- both from his mail and from the time Hux had some guys over from the office a few weeks back, sitting on the balcony with their little charcoal grill and their easy conversation -- that he’s casually house-hunting. Not really sure where yet, Hux said, clipped voice carrying loud in the evening air, but apparently he had a range and a down payment all figured out, and Kylo finished smoking one cigarette two floors up, stubbed the butt out on the railing and lit up another.

Kylo was thirty in December and it still doesn’t feel right, the big fucking three oh looming over him like a low cloud, pins and needles of rain over his chest and his arms and his legs. Hux is only four years older, but it feels like it might as well be four hundred, a massive, unbridgeable gap of professional subscriptions and leather attache case, suits and shined shoes -- Hux probably owns more ties now than Kylo will ever have in his life. Pocket squares, too, in colors to match, or tastefully clash -- dark blue polka dot that goes with the green tie or with the slate grey, his red hair neatly parted, the pale line of his throat stifled under the stand of his shirt collar, and sometimes Kylo would like nothing more than to pop the buttons open, one by one, lean in and bite, suck a blood-dark bruise into that silky pale neck, to feel Hux shiver under his mouth. To bend him over, slide his meticulously creased trousers down his narrow hips, and fuck the proper out of him.

His skin must be even paler where it’s always primly covered by so much cloth, almost translucent; Kylo thinks of the swell of his ass outlined by the tight trousers, the way it would fit perfectly in the span of his hands, the delicate curve of his spine as Kylo pushes him down over the kitchen counter or the banister on the landing or the trunk of his car -- it doesn’t really matter where, since it’s equally as unlikely to happen in any of those places.

Fuck.

Kylo swears out loud, the sound of his own voice suddenly startling in his empty bedroom. He is hard under the covers, and his hand moves down, autopilot, wrapping around his dick; he’s bucking up, rocking into his fist almost before he knows what he’s doing. There’s not enough room, the heavy quilt is stifling and he kicks at it, pushes with his free hand until it’s tangled somewhere at the foot of the bed, and the air is cool on his bare heated skin. He strokes up his length, slowly this time, and squeezes, feels his cock jerk in his grip. The thick head is already slick, and he drags the pad of his thumb over the slit, coaxes another sticky burble of precome out, and tries to imagine what Hux’s cock would feel like, curving up heavy against his stomach as Kylo reaches around his sharp cut side to take him in hand, slippery and hot.

He bites his lip as he pumps his hand up his dick, scrapes a nail over the vein underneath; it feels so fucking good, in a way he probably doesn’t deserve, and he shivers, hips fucking up into the empty air. He gives himself another hard squeeze, circles the tip again, spreading the slick around, letting it drip thickly down the side. He thinks of Hux whimpering as Kylo fists his dick, trying to keep himself quiet in stiff little shudders, maybe mouthing at his own hand so he stops making the needy little noises in his throat. His calm, steady voice going thready and rough when he’s being fucked, trapped tight against Kylo’s thighs, the push-pull of Kylo’s dick into the silky, heated clutch of his body, and Kylo groans, knuckles bumping crudely up against the head of his cock, callused palm catching on the ridge underneath.

Maybe some other time he’d want to draw this out. Tease and rub at himself as long as he can, slip his other hand under his balls, toy with the sensitive spot there. Push a spit-soaked finger up against his hole, circle and dip at the tight little furl of it. He doesn’t have the patience for it tonight, just wants to get there, his strokes going shorter, jerkier, hand wet with precome and sweat, breath coming in ragged, harsh pants. The tense feeling builds in his balls, up through his belly and spine, something overheated and too large and almost uncomfortable as he speeds up his hand, fist smacking into his thighs on each downstroke, a perverse, wet sound. He moans loudly when he comes, messy thick spurts that coat his fingers and splatter down onto his belly in hot strings, and he throws his head back against the pillows, damp mouth falling open, tongue pushing helplessly into his lower lip.

He lies there, half-dizzy and breathing hard, lazy hand working just a bit at his still-twitching dick, but he can already feel the jizz cooling tacky on his skin. He smears his fingers through the globs of it, glistening silvery on his stomach in the semi-darkness, and brings his hand up, shoves his fingers, dripping with it, between his open lips. He tightens his mouth and sucks on them like he’d suck on a cock, getting them down wet and deep, his tongue curling down to the base of his knuckles. He chases the salty bitter taste until it’s just skin and spit and then he pulls his fingers free with a slick pop, wipes the moisture from his chin with the back of his hand.

He doesn’t want to get up, but it’ll be worse if he lets himself fall asleep like this, stuck to the sheets, and Kylo forces himself to sit up and then stand, pads down the hall to the cramped little bathroom. He cleans himself off with a damp washcloth and stares at his face in the mirror in the sickly yellow light, a day’s worth of stubble on his chin and his hair plastered to the side of his head, cheeks and chest a sweaty, splotchy red. The thick, ropy scar tissue stark white against the backdrop of flushed skin. Dark circles under his eyes.

So. Clearly Hux won’t be able to resist that kind of charm. For fucking sure.

Kylo sighs. Turns off the bathroom light. Goes back to bed, pulls the now-cool sheet all the way over his head, and falls asleep wrapped all the way in it like he used to years ago, the corner of it bunched up under his cheek, hot and damp with his tired breath.

 

* * *

 

He sleeps too long the next morning, blearily makes a pot of coffee and downs two cups as he waits for his parents’ car to pull up outside, cousin Rey in tow. He hasn’t seen her in a year and a half, Leia and Han in about two, not really so much a conscious decision as it is a passive attempt at some kind of boundary, loosely set by rare e-mails and even rarer texts. He reads his mother’s weird little missives, full of smiley faces, quotes and platitudes from things she likes, and feels exhausted before he’s even written five words of a reply. She wants more than the _got it, I’m doing OK_ he usually ends up sending after a week’s gone by, phone guilting him with its reminder of seven, eight, nine new messages, each one sending his hands shaking worse than the last until he finally composes something more in his head, maybe another full sentence. _Status still quo, work’s going as usual, I think maybe my jaw’s always going to hurt when there’s weather, like I’m an old fishwife or something, here’s a link to that vid of a Corgi trying to jump over a fence and failing, will try to talk sooner next time, bye, K_.

He wonders if Han’s e-mails are Leia-sanctioned; they always look like they’ve been vetted too hard, full of things Kylo should relate to, things Ben would've liked once upon a time. Han sends articles from Popular Mechanics, movie reviews, pictures of Lego flying machines he’s building with Lando’s grandkids, everything needing some kind of validation, and Kylo grits his teeth, deletes _acknowledged, still alive_ , and quotes back something from the critic at the Courant, or from Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Twitter. He rubs at his temples and wrinkles his forehead and types, _Legos used to be simpler, I don’t remember needing an engineering degree to make Sabre Island_ , large thumbs bumping together awkwardly over the screen of his phone.

He misses the van pulling up. By the time he sees it out the kitchen window, double-parked at the curb below, his mother is already knocking at the door, small raps that turn large and fast and loud almost immediately, like everything with them, and Kylo dumps the rest of his third cup of coffee down the sink.

“It’s unlocked. It’s unlocked, Jesusfuckinchrist, would you stop that, mom, it’s open,” he yells, and they’re pouring through the doorway, Leia first and then Rey, clutching a neon orange duffel bag to her side.

“Ben,” his mother says, opening her arms, and he folds down for the obligatory hug. In his clumsy, long arms, she feels exceptionally small, bird-like, hollow angles sharper than he remembers, a wide messy stripe of grey at the roots of her hair like a swatch of paint.

“Ben, when was the last time you vacuumed in here?” Leia asks when he lets go. “What _is_ that smell? Get a window open, would you?”

“Kylo,” he corrects, and walks over to throw the kitchen window open. Less than thirty seconds; that’d be a record, maybe, he thinks, if she were anyone else.

“Hey,” Rey says, stepping up. She’s set her duffel down, and her thumbs are hooked in her pockets, fiddling back and forth like she’s nervous. “You look good. Hair’s a good length on you, I like it.”

“Thanks,” he says. “You’re down the hall to the right, if you want to start putting your stuff in there. I left the futon in there for you, wasn’t sure what you had going on for furniture.”

“Futon’s fine. I have a couple of things, but the bed wouldn’t fit in the Falcon, you know?”

“Right,” Kylo says, glancing down out of the window. The peeling dark blue door on the van is slid open. The bench seat’s been pushed back, and the resulting space is crammed full of what looks like everything Rey has ever owned, threatening to spill out of garbage bags and M&R Liquors boxes at any moment. The packing looks like a Han job, barely held in check by bungee cords and duct tape. A garland of Christmas lights dangles out of the mouth of an overstuffed backpack, winding the strap like a dubious holiday snake. The lights are shaped like chili peppers with little Santa hats on, and Kylo sighs. He’s pretty sure those are going to get strung up somewhere in his apartment soon, and the idea is really less than pleasant.

“Hey, kid,” Han says, coming through the door. He’s got a box in his hands, taped up and labeled _Rey -- books -- A_.

“Hey,” Kylo responds uncertainly. He’s probably supposed to be offering to help bring up Rey’s stuff, or maybe not even offering. Most likely he should probably just go right down, grab an overstuffed trash bag and hope it doesn’t explode halfway up the stairs.

“No elevator, huh?” Han states, setting Rey’s books down, and Kylo shakes his head no. It’s not like his parents are wrong, but he’s already feeling defensive. The apartment leaves a lot to be desired. Elevators, in fact, would be nice, and probably less asbestos, and normal carpeting or wooden floors instead of the green wall to wall shag that never looks clean, the shade matching the tile in the bathroom exactly. But the heat’s included, he’s got his own washer and dryer hook-up, doesn’t have to share two rattling machines in a basement, there’s assigned parking, and the balconies are kind of nice; in the grand scheme of things, the apartment is far and away above the kind of shithole he used to live in back when he was still in school.

“I’m gonna go bring up more stuff? There’s juice and whatever in the fridge,” he says, knowing that Leia is going to look in there whether he offers or not. There is still a bottle of Grey Goose in the freezer, but it hasn’t been opened and says Phasma on it in her big blocky Sharpie letters, and he finished the rest of the Harpoon last night and took out the trash.

He makes two trips up and down the stairs, grabbing the backpack with Rey’s kickboxing gear and more boxes of books, and pours himself some water from the sink before heading down a third time.

“You didn’t tell me you have a cat,” Rey yells from down the hall, and Kylo frowns, sipping at the glass.

“I don’t,” he calls in the direction of the spare room -- Rey’s bedroom now, he reminds himself, and quickly downs the rest of the water.

“She is so cute! Aren’t you? Aren’t you just the cutest,” Rey continues. Kylo doesn’t exactly remember his cousin ever talking to things that weren’t there, but he doesn’t really remember her baby-talking to anyone, either. Down outside, Leia is waving her arms at Han; he can’t hear what they’re saying, but Han is backing up into the van’s side, hands raised, looking sheepish and annoyed at the same time. Typical. They’ve probably been holding it in the entire drive up, what with Rey in the car, Kylo decides, steps away from the window and pokes his head down the hall to the right.

“What the fuck,” he says immediately after pushing open the door.

Rey’s crouched on the floor in front of the windowsill where, in fact, a bright orange cat is sitting, cocking its blunt striped head to give his cousin better petting access.

“Aw, _look at you_ ,” Rey coos, and scratches the cat under its chin. “Who is the prettiest? Yes, you are. Kylo, what’s her name?”

“No idea?” he says. “Rey, honestly. That’s not my cat. I would have remembered if I had a cat. I’m pretty certain, anyway. Come on, cat. Shoo. Out. Go. Go wherever you belong, OK?”

The cat ignores him, twitching its puffy, white-tipped tail. It turns around on the window, a graceful sidestep with tiny feet, and bumps up against Rey’s hands with a little murgling noise. Rey’s whole face lights up, and she gives the cat another scratch, fingers ruffling the fur down its spine. The cat arches its back and turns around again, presenting Rey with its left side, which gets scratched just as enthusiastically. The cat looks very pleased with itself, Kylo thinks, much too pleased, especially for something that doesn’t belong it his apartment in the slightest.

“B-- Ky-loh,” he hears from the kitchen, his mother carefully enunciating each syllable. It’s probably worse than just being called ‘Ben’, her trying; he’d almost rather she didn’t even bother.

“Come help your father with the recliner,” Leia calls, and he grunts back an affirmative before turning back to Rey.

“A recliner?”

“Oh, my god,” she says, turning her face away from the cat, though she continues to pet its arched spine and haughty little head. “It’s probably gross. You might be better off dropping it in the stairwell. Accidentally. It was on the side of the road with a free sign right outside of Enfield, and, well -- “

“Yeah. Say no more,” Kylo agrees. Han has never met a ‘for free’, ‘take it off my lawn’, ‘yes, it’s on cinderblocks but it’s still good’ trashpile he didn’t like. It used to embarrass him a long time ago, pulling over for a rusted bicycle, a vacuum cleaner with no wheels, a beltless treadmill. It didn’t matter if Ben had practice, or if his teammates were in the car, being ferried back home; Han would stop every time, circle his busted appliance of choice with a practiced eye, before declaring, “Kid, come give me a hand”, and Ben would go red, staring down at his own shoes, waiting as long as he could until finally complying.

Han _did_ find things that were less trash and more treasure from time to time: an old sewing machine with polished wooden drawers and a heavy iron foot pedal that was apparently worth over two thousand dollars on eBay. A set of enameled plates with chickens in the design that turned out to be one of a kind when Ben had looked it up, not that anything came of either. Han hung the plates up in the garage; the ones that hadn’t yet broken probably still hung there to this day, and the sewing machine’s drawers got repurposed as planters in the flower garden Leia had tried to keep out back, before they’d put in the in-ground swimming pool. The pool didn’t last all that much longer than the garden; Leia had sent him oversized, blurry photos of the backyard, all filled in but the pool fence still in place, surrounding nothing.

“Where are you? What are you doing in there?” Leia yells.

“Coming. For fuck’s sake,” Kylo yells in return, and heads back down the stairs.

The recliner isn’t actually that bad, for something left on the side of the road. It doesn’t look dirty, or even all that worn, and the mechanism still works when Kylo presses the button right there on the sidewalk. He ends up carrying it upstairs by himself, Han on his heels; it doesn’t fit through the hallway and Kylo sets it down in the living room, where the bookshelf had been. It even sort of matches the carpet.

The cat is gone by the time they’re done with the rest of Rey’s stuff and Kylo’s moved the van into a visitor spot. Probably escaped through whatever crack it had used in the first place, or maybe just through the constantly opening door. Rey doesn’t seem too distraught by this, and Kylo decides that’s the end of it until they’re eating Chinese take-out on paper plates in the kitchen, and someone knocks on the door, sharp and insistent. It’s probably Phil from 488, either here to complain about the noise or to get Kylo’s signature for one of his never-ending petitions to some jackass in the Mayor’s office. Rey hops up to answer it before he’s even gotten a word out, and Kylo follows her to the door with all the intention of telling Phil to pound sand, as per usual.

It isn’t Phil.

“Hi!” Rey says to Brendan Hux. He’s not wearing a jacket, and his pinstriped shirt sleeves are rolled up to the elbow. Kylo catches a glimpse of freckles, sunny little spots all over Hux’s forearms, the blue swirl of veins underneath the milk-pale skin of his wrists.

He swallows.

Hux sounds uncomfortable, if a little rehearsed, like he’s already given this spiel to half the building. Kylo supposes he probably has.

“I, uh, hello. I don’t suppose you’ve seen my cat? I think she got out somehow, earlier this morning,” Hux says. “She’s small, with white and orange stripes.”

“Nope,” Kylo says cheerfully at the same time Rey starts to say “Yes,” and he gives her the wide, angry eyes, brows scrunched in the center.

“Haven’t seen it, sorry. Have you tried asking the guy downstairs? He has a whole bunch of cats, maybe four or five,” Kylo says, “I think he’s in 290?”

“That’s me. _I’m_ that _guy_ ,” Hux says with a look of confused annoyance. “I only have just the one cat -- “

“Which you’re looking for. Now it all makes sense. Sorry, man, I got nothin’,” says Kylo, preparing to shut the door in Hux’s pinched ginger face, but of course, his mother picks this moment to insert herself into the situation.

“Would you like some help looking?” she says, coming up to the door as well, and Kylo rolls his eyes, tuning out the rest of the conversation. Hux seems reluctant, but of course, he doesn’t know Leia. She wins. It’s what she does, Kylo thinks as the door shuts behind her and Hux both a few moments later.

“What was that,” Rey says, shoving her feet into her beat-up Chucks.

“That was Hux. From downstairs. I fucking hate that guy,” Kylo says, and Rey gives him a _look_ , one that says ‘bullshit’ and ‘seriously’ and ‘what the fuck, Kylo’ all at once, with a resigned smattering of ‘do what you want, it's what you’re gonna do, anyway’.

“I see,” Rey says, pulling at her shoelace. Kylo considers apologizing, but he isn't really sure what he’d be apologizing for, exactly, so he leaves it alone, looming between her and the door in awkward silence.

“Oh, my god, I’m not going with them,” Rey says finally, trying to elbow her way past him. “I was just going to make sure we’ve gotten everything from the van, OK?”

Kylo sighs and heads for the balcony. At last count, Han was at the sink, scraping the remains of the Kung Pao back into the plastic container, but he follows Kylo out through the sliding glass door, stands next to him, leaning on the metal-tipped railing. Kylo clicks the wheel of his lighter, once, twice, again, keeps thumbing at it reflexively even after he’s lit the cigarette and taken a pull.

“Give me one of those,” Han says suddenly, and Kylo starts, drags the pack back out with awkward fingers, extends it out before putting it away again.

It feels weird enough smoking in front of his father; sharing a smoke is even stranger. Han had never explicitly told him off about it, but Leia’s always been the one too soft on the habit -- his first smokes were the Parliament Lights stolen from her zippered brown purse, with the tassels on the side. She lit one for him herself in the hospital parking lot when he was discharged, eyeing the prohibiting sign with a raised brow. He’d been shaking for one for days, and it felt incredibly good, satisfying, even with the rows of stitches up the side of his face, his lopsided busted lip.

Han doesn’t say anything for a long time, and Kylo watches him carefully out of the corner of his eye, his fingers shaking slightly as he ashes his cigarette to the side. He’s always been, well, _Han_ , Kylo thinks, and maybe larger than life is a trite concept, but it’s what he could always expect from his father until now. Now, his and Leia’s decade plus difference in age has gotten more obvious than it’s ever been, and Kylo keeps glancing, looking, at the wrinkles in Han’s neck, at his thinning hair, almost completely white over his leathery forehead. It’s as if someone has rubbed off the top layer of the man, and this is all that is left, minutely eroding more every single day.

“Where’d you go, kid,” Han used to say when he’d get like this, years and years ago. “What’s going on up there,” ruffling his hair, poking a finger into the top of his head; he hated it then, and he’s pretty sure he’d still hate it now, but Kylo is almost disappointed when it’s pretty clear that’s not forthcoming.

“Hey,” Han says instead. “Listen, don’t give Rey a hard time. She’s been real excited about school here, you know?”

“I know. I won’t,” Kylo agrees, and Han nods. It feels like maybe he’s supposed to say something else, but he doesn’t, and Kylo pulls his sweatshirt tighter around himself in the early evening chill, stares out into the parking lot and the street beyond, where headlights are smearing bright yellow trails over the darkened pavement.

His parents leave Sunday morning, after treating them to breakfast at Blondie’s Diner; Kylo sits with his elbows on the formica table and picks at his Eggs Benedict, smothered in Hollandaise sauce. Rey’s already through with her waffle, extra whipped cream and strawberry topping, and is strategically eyeing his plate. Kylo gets the passing waitress to top off his coffee and slides the rest of his food towards his cousin along with an extra napkin.

“Dude. Your generosity’s matched only by your freakish height,” Rey says, and tucks in. Kylo sips at the coffee; it’s good, that ubiquitous diner brew that’s almost, but not quite burnt that he’s never been able to replicate at home.

In the parking lot, Han reaches up, claps him on the shoulder. Rey hugs Leia, steps aside for Kylo, like they’re swapping. She looks a little like she might cry as the two of them get into Kylo’s car, and Han and Leia into the van, and stares into the rearview mirror as they peel out into the road.

Later, back in the apartment, Kylo finds the money they’ve left him, a little stack of fifties tucked in an envelope under his bedroom door. It’s humiliating that they think he needs it, and even more humiliating that he does. He counts the stack and splits it up into three smaller ones, picks a bill from the one on the left and puts it into his wallet. The largest stack goes back into the envelope and into his battered messenger bag. He thinks for a minute, pulls the hardcover of The Dark Tower from his bookshelf, slips the remaining bills into the front and replaces the book where it came from. He spends the rest of the afternoon in bed with his headphones in, leafing idly through The Wolves of the Calla; the front door slams a few times, Rey coming and going, and later he hears the microwave beeping, water running in the sink, but still doesn’t leave the room.

 

* * *

 

“Oh. My. God. I have to read you this one,” Phasma says, and clears her throat for emphasis. “Here we go. _Dear Sirs_ \-- points off right out of the gate, there -- _I’ve received my order, but alas, I am not able to tell you whether the merchandise will prove suitable to my needs_.”

“Alas?” Kylo repeats, fiddling with his pad of sticky notes. “What is this, community theater?”

“Right? Trust me, it only gets more Shakespearean. _The carrier has pushed my package all the way into the mailbox, and I am as yet unsuccessful in retrieving it_ \-- does this guy’s mailbox not open? Is it some kind of fused shut forever thing? Because I don’t think they make those. _I will be engaging in another attempt to retrieve my package tomorrow, and will be contacting you with my thoughts in the event I am successful. Dearly yours, Robert_. Good lord, Robert, do you talk to everyone like this, or are we just special?”

“Oh, Phas, my dear Sir, I would not dare communicate thusly with any one person under the sky but you,” Kylo snorts, and peels another sticky note from the top, rolls it up into a little tube, letting the glued part adhere to itself.

“Look at this one, I’ll message you the order number. _I don’t think I ever got this order and would like a refund. I don’t have the card anymore, so it needs to be cash or check, you can send to the address on file_ \-- yeah, wouldn’t be doing that anyway, but, look at the order date.”

“2004?” Phasma says, incredulous. “Really. Really? I’ve waited for twelve years for my order to arrive, but now I think it’s finally time for that refund? Who _are_ these people?”

“Shit, has it really been twelve years since 2004? I mean, the math checks out, but, fuck, that’s an unpleasant thought,” Kylo says, tossing the paper tube into the trash and starting on another.

“What, you find a grey hair somewhere in that glorious glossy mane this morning? Pearl Jam was on the classic rock station again?”

“Ha fuckin’ ha. What do you want to do for lunch? I’ll buy. I owe you, what, at least three by now?”

“Oh, I’m counting,” Phasma nods, mock-serious, and waggles her blonde eyebrows at him. “How about Leaf? They have this new mango-mint-parsley smoothie thing, it sounds repulsive, I know, and looks worse, but, actually, so, so good.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Kylo tells her, and locks his screen, a habit from two managers ago; there’s little chance of coming back to finding his background replaced with an obscene tangle of legs on a bed, or all his shortcuts gone, or everything flipped upside down, but it’s probably something he should be doing, anyway. Sometimes Phasma and Unamo keep the tradition alive; Phasma’s favorite is replacing Unamo’s desktop with a screenshot of her desktop, stifling giggles and sipping at her green juice as Unamo keeps clicking futilely on the database app.

After work, Phasma drags him to the gym; they don’t always go together, but she is eerily perfect at noticing when he’d rather not go home, or maybe he’s just gotten worse at hiding things around her. It’s possible. He’s known Phasma for what feels like forever; they started at the office the same week, though Phasma has seniority by three days and mentions it every time someone points them out as the oldest to a new hire.

“Well?” Phasma says when they’ve finished changing, and Kylo sighs.

“Rey’s already had, I don’t know, a zillion people over. She’s been living here less than a week. She’s gone to maybe three classes. Where did she even meet them? Is there some kind of place on campus, that lets you in with, uh, a secret code, _I’m new and I want to meet everyone and become best buds for life in the first five minutes_?”

“Yeah, there is,” Phasma scoffs. “It’s called ‘the campus’. Your cousin’s a pretty, outgoing girl, starting at a new school, all full of pep and bubbles and the exuberance of youth or whatever. It’s what she’s supposed to be doing, meeting new people. Would you rather she locked herself up in her cell and have you slide the assigned reading through the door?”

“No, I get it. It’s just -- for fuck’s sake, I’ve gone all these years without ever having Poe Dameron in my house, why do I have to start now? How is she friends with him already? He doesn’t even go to college, he’s an overgrown fucking townie.”

“So are you,” Phasma points out. Kylo gives her the evil eye.

“That’s different. I wasn’t _born_ here and my townie family before me. I moved here for school.”

“Which you graduated -- remind me when that was?”

“After you,” Kylo snipes weakly. “There are rules about this sort of thing. Moved here, got a diploma? Not a townie.”

“Right,” Phasma says, and punches him in the arm. “You’re on your own for the rest of the evening, Mr. I’m Not From Around Here. I have a date.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Cool your jets, it’s just this friend of Jamie’s. I’ve been advised to wear something ‘cute’, so I have to go do that.” Phasma says the word ‘cute’ like some people say ‘moldy’ or ‘vile’, and Kylo can’t help smiling. “God, does Jamie even know me at all? Why do I let her do this to me?”

“Want me to screen all the rest of Jamie’s friends, associates, and distant acquaintances for you?” Kylo offers, and Phasma shakes her head.

“Who could possibly measure up to your impossible standards for me? Wait, is this how it is with your cousin? Poe Dameron isn’t good enough to sully her virtue with his -- no, I’m sorry, I can’t. I can’t think of a negative. Have you seen him lately?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. Just last night, on my living room couch, watching my TV and drinking my beer. You’re more than welcome to come by, if you like him so much. I don’t know how it would work, exactly -- I mean, compared to you -- you could break him over your knee, if you wanted.”

“Exactly,” Phasma says dreamily. “Anyway, see you tomorrow morning.”

And every morning after that, Kylo adds mentally, and gets in the car. Sometimes, it feels like Phasma is the only person he can be completely honest with, and he tries not to take advantage of that too much. Unamo asked him once, a while after she’d started in the cube opposite theirs, why they weren’t together.

“You know, together-together. I actually thought you were, for a while. Is it because of work? Because I don’t think anyone would care.”

“I am not nearly up to Phasma’s ridiculously high standards,” Kylo said, laughing like it was the silliest of jokes, following it up with some banter about her other rejects, Prince Harry and Jennifer Lawrence, but the truth is, he knows for a fact he’s not the kind of person who could ever be good enough for her.

It’s comforting, knowing that. Like a strange sort of barometer for his overall state of being -- too low, and he’ll swing into the dangerous territory of Phasma deciding to stop putting up with his shit. Too high, and he might start getting _ideas_ \-- not that he’s in any danger of that much of an upswing. Phasma’s his closest friend -- probably his only real friend, all things considered. She makes his workdays bearable, reminds him to eat, and has called him Kylo since the day he introduced himself as such, never questioning why his paystub’s made out to Ben Organa-Solo. It’s more than he deserves, and he can never hold Phasma’s inherent superiority against her the way he does Hux’s.

Rey’s door is shut when he gets home, and he can hear laughter and voices coming through. The apartment smells like cookie dough. There’s a leather jacket hanging on the hook in the entryway, and he nearly trips over a pile of backpacks as he heads down the hall. Wonderful.

“Oh, are you fucking kidding me?”

The cat from the other day -- Hux’s cat -- is sitting in his bed, pointed little paws stretched out over his pillow. When he comes closer, he can see the individual orange zigzags of shed fur clinging to the pillowcase, and the cat makes a low, rumbling noise and rolls over, showing a brief flash of cream and white belly. It gathers itself up slowly and regally as he shoos at it, and jumps easily over onto his desk, and from there, to the top of his bookshelf. It jostles its tail over a snow globe, his chess set and his collectible figure of Vincent Valentine. Vincent wobbles a bit, but doesn’t fall; the cat turns around and plops itself on top of the chessboard, lashing its tail and staring at Kylo with its large, green saucer-eyes.

Millicent, Kylo remembers from the vet’s paperwork, and tries it now, reaching a cautious hand to the top of the shelf.

“Millicent, get down from there,” he says, probably with a lot less authority than he should, considering the cat is the intruder here, not him.

The cat doesn’t look impressed. In fact, it backs up all the way into the corner, where Kylo can almost, but not quite, reach -- and paws at Vincent again, a little tap at the edge of his bright red resin cape. Satisfied with its show of dominance, the cat begins grooming itself, paying neither Kylo nor his things any more attention.

“Fuck it,” Kylo says out loud, sits down on the bed, and begins unlacing his boots.

The logical, reasonable -- not to mention, nice -- thing to do in this situation would be to shut his bedroom door, trapping the cat inside, and to go two floors down to retrieve Hux. He imagines it: knocking on the door. Listening for the footsteps. Pictures the door swinging open, and thinks of Hux’s face. His pointed nose, sharp cheeks. His petulant, unsmiling mouth. Maybe this might net Kylo a smile, but probably not; imaginary Hux follows him up the stairs with the same pinched expression as always, pausing at Kylo’s door, and there, Kylo’s imagination abruptly stops.

He can’t picture Hux here, in his room, with its unmade bed and desk and bookshelf from Target, messy pulp paperbacks spilling over in stacks and piles. His plaid sheets washed grey, his bleach-stained comforter. A matching resin Sephiroth across the chessboard from Vincent, posed to raise his plastic sword above his head, his silvery hair sculpted to look like it’s flowing in the wind. Hux doesn’t belong here, and Kylo looks back over at the cat, finished with her paws and moved on to licking the tip of her tail. She doesn’t look even slightly distressed.

“Millicent,” he says again; the cat’s pointed ears twitch, then relax. Kylo pulls off his boots and his shirt, takes the pillowcase off of the pillow and tosses it to the floor, and stretches out on the bed, already reaching for his headphones.

Fuck it.

He turns up the volume, and closes his eyes, and tries picturing Hux again, maybe not here, maybe sitting on the couch in his living room like Poe had yesterday. Legs spread out like he owned the place, a bottle of Circus Boy sweating in his hand, fat droplets trickling down the heavy brown glass. Kylo is looking up at him from the floor, nestled between his open knees, and Hux motions at him with the bottle, pulls at his shoulder with his free hand until Kylo gets the hint. He shuffles his knees across the floor and comes closer, bending down to yank at Hux’s zipper, and there his recalcitrant brain stops him again, pointing out how weird it is for him to imagine undoing Hux’s trousers right now -- and no. That won’t work.

Kylo switches from the Hux in his head to Joseph Gordon-Levitt instead, and then Gillian Anderson, imagines inching her Agent Scully pencil skirt up her knee while she fixes him with an icy stare, red hair tumbling around her shoulders.

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep; when he wakes up, the cat is gone and his alarm is minutes away from ringing. He grabs for his phone to turn the alarm off, finds the charge at 19%, and spends far too long trying to remember if he has an extra cable at work. Phasma will probably have one, he finally decides, and forces himself into the shower.

 

* * *

 

Snoke calls him into his office towards the end of the day, and Kylo stands uncomfortably in front of his desk until he’s invited to sit down. Snoke looks at him like he always does -- like he knows something Kylo doesn’t and never will, and isn’t telling. Thirty fucking years old and he still feels like an ignorant child in the face of his boss, the cops, the _dentist_. If that’s not going away even now, if even this much doesn’t get him feeling like an actual adult instead of awkward Ben, then there’s no advantage to being older at all. Just a slew of steadily worsening side-effects.

Snoke talks for a long time, about Kylo’s productivity and his goals and the company culture, and Kylo clenches his hands in his lap and hopes his face looks attentive enough. His jaw twinges, little hints of an ache like maybe it’s going to rain soon, and he thinks he says, “Yes, sir” at all the right times, and “Thank you, sir,” when Snoke is done.

“Gym? No, pub,” Phasma says, giving him a quick understanding look, and Kylo nods. He shouldn’t. Really, he shouldn’t, but he needs a fucking drink, maybe three, and he lights up a cigarette in the parking lot after they’ve clocked out.

The Thirsty Owl’s pretty busy for a weeknight, but Phasma manages to snag them a little table in the corner nook, a ways behind the jukebox. It’s playing something twangy that Kylo can tune out easily, and they go through a beer each before Phasma asks, “What could he have possibly said? Your metrics are great, you answer more tickets than the rest of the department combined.”

“In a nutshell? That yeah, my numbers are great, and I’m efficient, and all that fucking fabulous shit, but I have a terrible attitude. That I may take care of them, but I’m irreverent to our customers’ needs and problems, and therefore, can’t possibly be taking care of them well enough.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Also, I need to remember that we’re all working towards the same goal, and to be mindful of that every day.”

“Maybe you could swear less?”

“Never once mentioned that. Just that I need to be -- what was it, exactly? Better at relating to my fellow humans.”

“Oh, like Snoke knows the last thing about being human,” Phasma says, and Kylo bites down hard on his lower lip.

“I try. You know that, right? I am trying, and I think this is the best I can fucking do. Any more, and it’s going to look like, I dunno, _hey, this is my human suit, see how well it fits_.”

Kylo pauses, staring off towards the door, where the bell jingles, letting the tides of college kids out and in.

“Do you ever feel like -- I don’t know -- like, this isn’t where you’re supposed to be?” he says finally, pulling at the label of his beer bottle. It’s wet from condensation, shredding easily in his hands, and he scrapes at the glass until most of the paper has sloughed off in gross little scraps on the table.

Phasma arches a thin blond brow.

“You mean here in this bar. On a Thursday night. With you. Or in the more existential sense? Please stop that, by the way; it’s disgusting.”

Kylo obediently cleans up the scraps with a napkin, balling it up under his coaster. Phasma wrinkles her nose.

“Anyway, yeah, sure. Everyone feels like that sometimes; it’s kind of part of the human experience,” she says, and shrugs. “I hate to say it, because that’s probably my solution to everything -- but, well, it’s my solution to everything for a reason. What you need is to get good and laid, preferably a couple of times once you’ve taken the edge off, and then you’ll be able to look at things a bit more -- what’s a good word that’s like maudlin, but the opposite, without being too cheesy?”

“Calmly?” Kylo suggests. “Pragmatically? Yeah, I mean, you’re probably right, which reminds me, how did it go with what’s-his-name, Jamie’s friend?”

“Ugh, don’t even ask,” Phasma says, and takes another look at the specials board. “First of all, he is a vegan, and would not shut up about it.”

“Weren’t you vegan for, what, three years?”

“Sure, but I didn’t make it my life’s goal to insert it into every sentence. Also, he said the both of us would have been more comfortable if I’d worn flat shoes. I said I was pretty comfortable as is, and he made that face, you know, the annoyed short guy face. Like that face Alec always used to make when you had to reach shit on tall shelves for him.”

“Oh, good god,” Kylo says, and Phasma grins wide.

“Yes, kinda like the face you’re making right now, but _shorter_. Listen, you know that Snoke’s out of there by the end of the year, pretty much guaranteed, right? And I’m not saying we’re all getting bumped up one, but -- “

“You deserve it,” Kylo says firmly, putting a hand on her wrist, and she smiles again, flips her hand over and strokes their fingers together.

“Oh, I know I do, but that’s not what I mean. I’ll be able to give you a killer recommendation if you want one, or you can see how you feel about your own bump.”

“You really think I’ll get one?”

“Well, yeah. What the fuck else are they going to do? They’d need at least two more Unamos to get the same results,” Phasma says. “So. One more for the road?”

Rey is sitting on the floor in front of the TV when he gets home, wedged between Poe Dameron and another good-looking guy Kylo doesn’t know. She’s got an arm wrapped around them both.

“Hey,” she says, and waves, extricating a hand from Poe’s shoulder. “I think you know Poe, and this is Finn. That’s Kylo, my cousin.”

“Yeah, I know Poe,” Kylo says. “Finn.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” Rey says, “we were going to watch Mad Max? You can watch with, if you want.”

“Nah, I’m good,” Kylo tells her, feeling suspiciously like a third wheel even though by his math, that shouldn’t make sense. His fingers itch for a smoke, but he’d have to navigate the tangle of the three of them on the living room floor to get to the balcony, and he pulls his jacket back on and heads back outside, down the stairs.

He sits down on the building steps, in the big yellow circle of streetlamp, and lights up, breathes in and tries thinking about nothing, but someone’s shuffling around the side of the building, short, careful steps through the gravel and mulch, and Kylo looks over.

“Millie! Millie, where are you?” he hears before he sees Hux step out into the light. Hux peers intently in the direction of the parking lot, then the playground, then stops, turns, and starts circling the apartments back around.

“Millie,” he calls again, voice going kind of shrill, and a little desperate, which isn’t a word -- or an emotion -- Kylo associates with him at all. It’s strange, seeing buttoned-up, resolute Hux so stymied by something. So dejected, so _concerned_ , and maybe Kylo just doesn’t know him well enough to tell. Maybe this is as normal a state of Hux’s being as packaged neatly into his suit and tie, as the slicked back hair and the expression of cool disdain he is most used to.

Who is he kidding, Kylo thinks, he _doesn’t_ know Hux well enough or nearly at all, beyond his probably shameful and maybe, possibly, creepy snooping into Hux’s letters. Finders keepers may have been a good excuse for that maybe if he was still Ben, sullen teenager. Ben, idiot kid who just didn’t know any better, but as an adult, it’s starting to look more and more like a bad cliche from an episode of Law  & Order. _He started with my letters, detective, but oh, god, I think now he’s in my house!_

Kylo inhales, exhales, feeling the welcome burn in his chest, and looks up.

Hux has circled the building one more time; in the harsh electric light, he looks starkly pale, every freckle dotted brighter than usual, his hair even redder, soft and free of of its usual gelled set. He is wearing jeans and a long-sleeved tee, worn, smudged lines in place of his standard battle uniform, and his narrow shoulders are hunched, a soft slump, as he heads for the walkway in. Kylo shifts on the steps to make room for him to go back inside, but to his surprise, Hux sits down on the top step, runs nervous, thin fingers through his hair, pushing it back away from his face.

He’s too close, Kylo thinks; too close not to say anything. The thing to say, much like the other day, should be, “I’ve seen her, you know,” or “She’ll come back, don’t worry,” but Kylo gestures with his cigarette instead, inscribing a small twist of smoke in the air.

“Want one?”

“Sure,” Hux says, hunching even tighter into himself, but he reaches out his hand and takes the offered cigarette from Kylo’s pack, along with his lighter. He coughs a little bit taking the first inhale, and crooks his mouth bashfully, as if he’s admitting some kind of secret, a hidden weakness for Kylo to make use of. It’s only fair, Kylo thinks; his own weakness, after all, is written all over his face in shards, a kaleidoscope pattern of scar tissue. Their eyes meet when Hux hands the lighter back over, and Kylo braces himself for it, any one of the litany of possible questions, all condensed down to one thing -- a feigned, imagined empathy for the guy with the scar, and underneath, a shameful gratitude: _thank god it’s him, not me_.

Hux doesn’t stare. He doesn’t look away too quickly, either, like they do, caught out. He places the lighter back into Kylo’s hand and takes another drag off the cigarette, this one surer and steadier; he isn’t looking at Kylo anymore, just sitting there, and Kylo keeps waiting, anxious. Waiting for something that doesn’t come.

He doesn’t know what possesses him to do it. Maybe it’s the resigned look in Hux’s wide, green eyes as he finishes the cigarette down to the nub, or his slouched shoulders as he sits on the step, like he can’t make himself go back inside. Maybe it’s none of those things; maybe Kylo is still a little drunk and shouldn’t be thinking. His hand feels awkward, heavy, as he puts it on the side of Hux’s face, leans in, and presses their mouths together.

He doesn’t know what he’s expecting. Maybe to be punched at worst, maybe politely rebuffed at best.

He doesn’t expect Hux’s lips to be so soft. It’s almost shocking, the smooth texture against his, Hux’s mouth just a little bit chapped and tasting of smoke. He is so pliant under the push of Kylo’s lips, that for a moment, it’s all there is, a warm, blank rush of sensation, Hux’s breath on Kylo’s face, Kylo’s heart suddenly pounding very hard in his chest.

Hux makes a small, muffled noise into his face; Kylo feels the slight shift of his jaw under his hand, but Hux isn’t pulling away. Kylo sucks in a harsh inhale through his nose and parts his mouth tentatively, slides just the tip of his tongue carefully out to lick gently at Hux’s full bottom lip. It’s been so long since he’s kissed someone for the first time, someone whose response he can’t predict, doesn’t know to a minute detail. Hux is new, a mystery.

Kylo brings up his other hand and curls it into Hux’s hair, slowly tightens his fingers until he’s gripping with a bit of force, just enough to guide him forward a little, to let Kylo lick a little harder at the seam of his lips. Hux’s mouth slides open almost lazily, and he is pressing closer, pushing his tongue against Kylo’s in an almost deliberately slow glide.

“Oh, fuck,” Kylo mumbles into the kiss, suddenly aware that they’re sitting on the grimy steps of his goddamn apartment building, pressed against each other like kids after prom. Hux closes his mouth around Kylo’s lip and sucks lightly, then he’s opening wide again, his nose bumping up into Kylo’s cheek.

Kylo shivers. It’s good. Fuck, it’s so good, the wet open glide of their mouths together. He lets the edge of his teeth catch on Hux’s lip a bit, then nips at him more deliberately, harder, before soothing the hot, slick spot with his tongue. He untangles his hand from Hux’s hair and lets it slide, palm pressing into hot skin, down to the back of Hux’s neck, claiming, possessive; something Alec wanted and couldn't stand him to do. Kylo tenses up, strained. Alec, he reminds himself, not Hux, who’d tell him his hands were ridiculous, overly large, just like everything about him, but would kiss his knuckles, one by one. Who’d look away but slide closer when Kylo pushed at him, grabbed at him, big hands arranging him to Kylo’s liking.

Fuck.

Kylo pulls back and stares at Hux; his cheeks are pink, hair tangling, loose and messy, over his forehead. His mouth is red and wet, stark in his face -- probably because Hux is so pale; it looks a little swollen already, plush and inviting.

Hux is looking up at him expectantly, and Kylo suddenly can’t stand it anymore.

“I, uh. I should probably go back inside,” he says abruptly, aware that he started this, that he is being completely unreasonable, but Hux just nods.

“OK,” he says, and Kylo springs up, practically vaults up the building stairs and back up the hall, until he’s safely at his door.

There is something really, really wrong with him. Fucking goddamn.

The TV is looping the Fury Road disc menu over and over on the screen; Rey’s door is predictably shut. He does not want to know what is going on in there, he decides, as he heads for his bedroom. He is half-expecting the cat to be there again, but she isn’t; his room is empty, the air inside a little stale. Kylo resists opening the window, in case Hux is still out there, sitting on the steps or circling the parking lot again, and shuts off the light as quickly as he can.

How is this so easy for other people, he wonders, lying down in his bed. Rey, with her happy exuberance for meeting everyone and anyone. Phasma, who is maybe a lot more cynical but with no smaller a social circle; she may be his only real friend, but she has tons aside from him, some of them dating back to high school, for fuck’s sake. He can’t imagine having enough in common with anyone he -- Ben -- knew back in high school to ever exchange anything than meaningless small talk, not that he’s at all good at that outside of customer calls, scripted by someone with a much better understanding of what people really want to hear. Hux --

\-- fuck, Hux. He can’t even try to imagine what Hux must be thinking right now. He was probably better off quietly reading through Hux’s magazine subscriptions rather than this. He is such a ridiculous child. _Ben_ is such a ridiculous child.

It’s probably another testament to something being horribly wrong with him, that he thinks immediately of Ben when he’s fucked something up. When he’s trying to talk to his mother, or Snoke, or a complete stranger on the phone, lost for words, he suddenly reverts to Ben, awkward clumsy, ridiculous Ben, not Kylo. Kylo’s supposed to know what he’s doing. At least a little bit.

Kylo should know how to fix it.

 

* * *

 

“You’re overthinking it,” Phasma tells him, leaning on the wall of his cube. “Just go over there with a six pack or something. What does he like, pretentious microbrew?”

“Yeah, probably,” Kylo says, considering. “He gets a mailer from Otter Creek on a pretty regular basis.”

“You creeper,” Phasma says fondly.

He ends up grabbing some Allagash on his way home, and studies his face in the bathroom mirror for a long time before going down the stairs to knock on Hux’s door.

Hux opens it almost immediately, though clearly, he was expecting someone else, maybe some good Samaritan returning Millicent or something to that effect. For a brief second, he looks really hopeful, eyes open wide and bright, and then his face falls ever so slightly, like someone pulling down a blind.

It doesn’t feel very encouraging, and Kylo lifts up the beer defensively, like it’s his sole excuse for coming, and tries to remember how his mouth works.

To his surprise, Hux invites him in.

Kylo looks around, quick and curious, while Hux is depositing the beer in his fridge. Its exterior is polished chrome; it doesn’t look like the units that come standard in the apartments. By the time they’ve settled into the living room, Kylo feels a sharp spike of envy lodge itself somewhere between his second and third ribs. The space itself is much the same as the one two floors up, the layout identical -- a big expanse of living room that turns into adjoined kitchen, the hallway leading off to the bedrooms and bath -- but Hux’s apartment is appointed like a catalog picture, like his things were purchased deliberately and with each other in mind, unlike the haphazard furnishings of Kylo’s place, still milk crates and particle board shelves and the mismatched chairs at his table.

There is a large wood and rope cat tree set up by the living room window, and a few other things scattered throughout that are clearly for Millicent’s use. A cushion on the floor right behind the couch. A plastic ball that squeaks when Kylo nudges it with his foot. In the kitchen, a water dish, and a few felt mice with swishy cloth tails. Kylo tries not to look at them as he sits down on Hux’s overstuffed dark grey couch and fiddles with the remote.

They sit for a while, drinking beer and watching Hux’s impressively large TV. Kylo talked himself through a few possible conversation points on the drive home, and he tries his best to use them now, but mostly he just listens to Hux, his calm, precise voice so unlike the plaintive, desperate one he heard the night before.

Hux talks about work just a little, enough to satisfy Kylo’s curiosity but not so much that his eyes go glazing over. In a perfect world, he’d rather not think about Hux’s job at all -- it seems to suit him to a T, like it’s something he’d been planning on doing since he first learned his times tables -- and Kylo hates answering back with what he does, always looking for that elusive way to say his job doesn’t define him without sounding like a pretentious failure. His eyes slide over a worn, dog-eared copy of The Stand on Hux’s side table, and he points a finger, happy to have something else come up.

“I read it for the first time when I was 15. Walked around in a daze for a week, freaking out at people coughing in the hallway.”

“I always thought King was a hack,” Hux says, and Kylo crooks his mouth -- it’s not that Hux doesn’t have a point, but it still rubs him the wrong way, but Hux goes on, unperturbed. “I’d read Rose Madder and Desperation in high school, and there was that really horrible TV miniseries they did of The Langoliers, and it was all so disappointing. I thought, this is it? This is the bestseller, the top of the list? How underwhelming.”

He shifts on the couch, and looks at Kylo, taking a sip from his bottle.

“And then I started college, I’d just moved from Coventry, and I was kind of missing it, low-key, trying not to get completely drowned in how huge all my classes were, and my roommate had a copy of Salem’s Lot. I got to reading it in the mornings, bit by bit, waiting for him to get done with the shower, and after a few days, I found I was really looking forward to it. And then it hit me that I was reading a story about -- well, more or less my hometown, except with vampires in it. It’d been over twenty years since the book came out, and nothing had really changed. King was describing this insular little community, and it probably sounds ridiculous, but -- it made me feel better about leaving it, you know?”

“Hah. Yeah, I’m originally from Westfield,” Kylo says. “I don’t know what it’s more like -- Salem’s Lot or Our Town. Maybe both, just with less parable and also fewer vampires. I think.”

Hux has been shifting almost imperceptibly as they’ve been talking; Kylo isn’t sure if Hux has even noticed he’s doing it, or if it’s happening purely on instinct, Hux’s body leading ever closer, stitch by stitch across the couch, towards Kylo. He is painfully aware of the warmth radiating off of Hux, almost close enough to touch, if Kylo just _leans_ \-- then maybe, he could kiss Hux again, sidle up to him gracelessly until it’s the only step left.

It feels like something Ben would do, and Kylo really, really doesn’t want to be Ben right now.

“Listen,” he says, cutting Hux off in the middle of a sentence about Walter o’Dim. “I don’t know what you were thinking, but I really want to suck your cock. That OK?” He is already sliding to the floor as he says the words, pushing the coffee table out of the way to kneel in front of Hux’s lap.

“OK?” he repeats, and puts a hand on Hux’s knee. This is where he feels comfortable. Confident. He is good at this, and he knows it, wants Hux to know it, too.

“Yes,” Hux grates out, almost viciously, and Kylo laughs, running his hands up Hux’s skinny thighs, and pulls his zipper down.

His dick is half-hard already, and it firms up more in Kylo’s hands. He wraps his fingers around it and jacks it a couple of times, feeling it fill out, the head velvety-smooth under the swipe of his thumb. Above him, Hux sighs, a shaky exhale, and Kylo leans in, draws the tip of Hux’s cock to his mouth, and runs a hot little circle with his tongue around where his thumb is pressed, just over the slit.

He looks up into Hux’s face, his mouth half-open, meets his eyes, and then slowly and deliberately wraps his lips around the head of Hux’s dick, and gives it a firm, wet suck. Hux groans. His hands slide immediately down to Kylo’s head, wrapping around the back of his skull; Kylo lets him do it, thinks of those hands gripping at him, pushing him all the way down Hux’s cock, stuffing him full of it. It’s a good image. He feels himself getting hard in his own jeans, pushing out the seam, and makes a little noise around Hux, slurps him down fully, stretching out his jaw.

He hollows out his cheeks, wraps his top lip over his teeth and slides all the way back up, following his mouth with his hand, feeling the lines of veins on the thick length. He curls his tongue around the head again, drags the tip of it right under the crown and then up to nudge at the slit. Hux is dripping precome against his tongue, a hot salty taste in his mouth, and his hands tighten in Kylo’s hair, pulling at it. Kylo can feel the strands sifting between Hux’s fingers, and Hux pushes up with his hips, the head of his cock bumping up into the roof of Kylo’s mouth.

A wet drop of saliva slides down Kylo’s chin, and he looks upwards at Hux again as he takes him in deeper. Hux’s eyes are fixed on him, staring down at the obscene, slippery slide of his dick into Kylo’s mouth, and Kylo can’t resist showing off a bit. He relaxes his throat and threads himself down, as far as he can go, until his nose is buried in the prickly red curls around the base of Hux’s cock, and then he is swallowing, feeling Hux’s cock settle all the way at the back of his throat.

“God, Kylo,” Hux hisses, fingers pulsing on the back of his head. “So good, _Christ_.”

Kylo breathes, noisy and damp through his nose and bobs his head back up just a little before slamming back down deep.

He can’t do it for long; Hux thrusts up and in again, and Kylo can feel his throat getting raw, eyes pricking with moisture from the effort of it. His chin is a mess of precome and spit, drooling down in steady strings, and he goes back to helping himself with his hand again, fingers fisting a tight ring under where his mouth is wrapping Hux’s dick, his palm slick and getting slicker. Hux is fucking up in between his lips in shallow little thrusts, but he’s speeding up, movements becoming more desperate and erratic.

His jeans are tight, almost painful over his hard dick; if he moves just a bit closer, he can rub up into Hux’s leg, and he does it, shameless, needing the friction badly. Hux is close -- his fingers are digging mercilessly into Kylo’s scalp, and he is making sharp little noises with every thrust, harsh, stifled whines from his pale throat. Kylo slides his mouth gracelessly up and down, no more finesse, hand moving quickly in tandem. Hux screws his eyes tightly shut when he comes, hitches his reddened bottom lip into his mouth, teeth scoring at it haphazardly.

Kylo jacks him through it, keeping his lips sealed tight around the head, mouth filling with the thick, briny taste as he wrings it all out of Hux’s dick, heavy spurts of come landing on his tongue, the back of his mouth. He swallows as much as he can, feels some of it leaking out of the corner of his mouth, dripping back down the hot length of Hux’s dick, and he smears it around with his hand, rubs it into the smooth hot skin stretched taut. Hux shudders.

“Jesus,” he says finally, voice shaky. “You’re amazing at that, Kylo. Fuck, come here.”

Kylo stands up on unsteady legs, and tugs his jeans open. Hux pulls him in and kisses him deep, sucks the taste of himself from Kylo’s mouth. His bitten lips are hot and swollen against Kylo’s, the kiss almost painful with how used, how sore his own mouth feels, but Hux keeps kissing him, wet and dirty, as he strokes Kylo’s dick. He fists it in long, tight pulls that make Kylo moan and arch his back, hips pushing helplessly into Hux’s grip. He comes, noisy and messy, all over Hux’s long fingers, streaks of it landing on Hux’s forearm, painting over the little freckles there.

He cleans himself up quickly in Hux’s bathroom; Hux doesn’t follow him, and he can hear water running in the kitchen sink. When he comes out, doing up his belt, Hux gives him a long, almost questioning look that makes a shiver go up the back of his spine, and he bunches his hands uncomfortably in his shirt as he tries to decide whether to join Hux back on the couch.

“I should probably go back upstairs,” he decides out loud, and Hux blinks, wraps his fingers around his other bony wrist, and shakes it out like he’s working through a cramp.

“You could stay,” he offers, gesturing down the hall, and Kylo tries, he really does, but now that the edge is off, in Phasma’s words, Hux’s apartment feels stifling. The cat toys, breaking up his perfectly arranged living room. His pictures in their frames, the neat spines of his books and his glasses case on the side table, stamped Burberry on its leathery front. The chrome plated facades in the kitchen. Kylo feels like an intruder, like a vandal come to sack a city, and he shakes his head.

“I’ll see you. Good night,” he says, and walks to the door.

It’s shitty of him. Juvenile. It’s like something he would have done in college -- though he thinks, as he’s climbing the stairs, that he probably gave much worse head back then. At least Hux is getting the benefit of experience to compensate for Kylo’s barbaric lack of manners.

At home, Rey seems to be out for the night. Kylo makes himself some toast, slathers it with peanut butter, and eats it standing at the kitchen counter, licking the extra peanut butter right off of the knife.

 

* * *

 

The cat wakes him up the next morning, pawing at his hair and mewing right into his face, and Kylo nearly breaks his hand flailing around in confusion. He comes to, blinking owlishly, and stares at the cat’s orange muzzle, the little bit of white at the base of her pink, almost see-through ears.

She follows him as he heads to the kitchen, still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, and Kylo feels compelled to pull a can of tuna out of the cabinet, and dump it into a soup bowl for her on the floor. He thinks he may have read somewhere that canned tuna isn’t really good for pets -- too much salt, or something like that -- but he figures one can won’t do much either way, and she seems to be working through it eagerly enough, sucking it up into her tiny predator mouth as the bowl rattles into the tile.

While Millicent eats, Kylo tries to figure out where she’s been getting in. After a cursory examination, he decides it’s most likely the vent in the hallway, the one with the broken grate. It seems to be the most reasonable explanation, unless the cat can travel through walls, and he grabs a milk crate of books from his bedroom and sets it in front of the grate, effectively blocking it off so she can’t use it anymore.

The cat observes him idly as he works. He pours himself some cereal after, sitting down at the kitchen table, and the cat jumps in his lap promptly, jostling him enough that he dribbles some milk from his spoon. She purrs loudly while Kylo is eating, and butts at his arms, his hands, his moving elbows.

“Obnoxious beast,” he tells her, setting the spoon down, and scratches her behind a cocked ear, and then, encouraged, under her fuzzy chin, while he tries to decide what to do next.

Once again, his rational brain supplies the most reasonable option. Go right down to Hux’s, cat in tow, and make his fucking week.

The thought of knocking on Hux’s door makes him vaguely queasy. What would he even say? “Hey, man, sorry for running out on you last night, it was good, but I don’t know how to relate to my fellow humans. By the way, here’s your cat. See you around.”

Yeah. Kylo knows what _he_ would say to that. It makes sense that Hux would probably have a similar reaction.

He could maybe let the cat loose in the hallway, he considers. She probably knows where she lives.

“Do you?” he asks, like Millicent can answer. She bats at his hand in what he considers a suitable response, claws half-out.

Maybe Rey could return the cat for him. Later. When she gets back from Dameron’s or wherever she spent the night, and he should probably be more concerned about that, but in his memory, Rey has always known what she was doing. Has always been better at taking care of herself than he had been at her age.

He texts her anyway, a few words just to check in. _Hey, you doing OK? Need me to come get you anywhere?_

His phone buzzes back in a few moments. _Dude, no, I am GOOD_ , followed up by a string of assorted smilies and a little pink heart. _Be home in a few hours_.

OK then.

“Looks like it’s just us,” he tells the cat, and gently chivvies her off his lap. “Come on, you can help me do something productive with my Saturday.”

He does three loads of laundry, scrubs the bathroom, the kitchen floor, the crusted mess he most certainly didn’t leave in and around the blender. He should probably ask Rey about it, maybe set up some kind of cleaning rota or at least split the chores -- it’s funny how living with someone for a few years didn’t really prepare him for that. His dorm room at school was always a disgusting mess and his first apartment after that looked the same whether he cleaned it or not. With Alec -- well, splitting up responsibilities was never the problem with him.

Kylo was the problem. Kylo had probably been the problem in the few relationships before that, too, but they’d never gotten to the same stage of serious, and it was much easier to say they just didn’t work out.

He’s just done putting clean sheets on his bed when he hears Rey’s keys jangle outside the door. Millicent looks up from her position on Kylo’s desk chair.

“You be good and quiet, OK? I mean it. Don’t be an ass. Leave my toys alone,” he tells her, and shuts her in. He isn’t really sure why he’s bothering to hide her from Rey; after all, he’ll probably need Rey’s help with her in a few minutes, but it feels like the thing to do, and he walks back out to the kitchen, starts putting a sandwich together from the pre-packaged ham and cheese in the fridge.

“Hey,” Rey says, giving him a sunny smile. Her hair’s pulled back into a weird, but kind of awkwardly endearing set of three buns, held together with neon-bright hair ties.

“Finn did it,” she says, rolling her eyes when she catches him looking. “I think it’s cute that he tried. Better than bedhead, anyway.”

She’s wearing a t-shirt that’s at least two sizes too big on her, and there’s a dark red hickey on her neck, just under the worn round of collar, and Kylo makes a soft ahem in her direction.

“So that’s going well, I take it?” he says as diplomatically as he can.

“I dunno. I think so? It’s too early to call it whatever. Finn and Poe have a thing, and I think I like being a part of their thing right now. Does that satisfy your curiosity and your parental instincts?”

“Yes. Plenty,” he says, and slices the sandwich in half on the diagonal. He sets her half on a plate, leaves his right on the cutting board as he brings them to the table. “Want a pickle with yours? There are only two left, and I will definitely eat them both if you don’t stake your claim.”

“No way, man, that pickle’s mine fair and square,” Rey says, grabbing for the jar. He watches her chew for a moment before starting in on his food; Rey still eats like she did when she was a kid, with delighted gusto, taking huge bites and licking mustard and pickle juice from her fingertips.

“I did the wash,” Kylo tells her, “so there’s clean towels and if you need fresh sheets, there’s now a set in the hall closet. I didn’t go through any of the stuff in your room, but I threw the t-shirts from the hamper in with mine on cold, that OK?”

“You didn’t have to do that,” Rey says, but the corners of her eyes crinkle. “Thank you.”

She throws out the empty pickle jar and takes their dishes to the sink, scrubs at them with the sponge before setting them to drip in the strainer.

“I really like it here,” she says, apropos of nothing, drying her hands on her borrowed shirt.

“I’m glad,” he tells her, and means it. He’s just about to ask her about maybe helping him take Millicent downstairs when she sits back down.

“Hey. Do you remember when you danced with me?” she says, and slides a hand over the wooden surface of the table, picks at the grain with her nail. “At my parents’ anniversary thing, back before, you know.”

The divorce, he fills in, remembering the streamers in the rented reception hall, Leia thanking him, quick and stressed, for driving back down from school to attend. Uncle Luke and Aunt Mara looking strained already, even over the toasts they were making to each other. Han, in a suit for once. Rey, in a dress she clearly hadn’t picked out herself, hair freshly cut and pinned back with sparkly barrettes over her sullen face.

“Yeah,” Kylo says, “I remember.”

“I was twelve,” Rey continues. “I didn’t want to be there, it was awful, and mom and dad had a giant screaming fight just that morning, and it was so obviously all bullshit. I was trying to get my friend to come over, but her parents wouldn’t give her a ride, and I thought I was just going to lose it. Burst into tears right in the middle of the floor and ruin it all. You know, whatever was left of it to ruin.”

She stops picking at the tabletop and folds her hands in front of her, lacing her fingers together.

“And then you came over and sat with me, even though I didn’t like you at all. And you said my dress looked nice, and you asked me to dance to this stupid Sinatra song. You were terrible at it.”

“Trust me,” Kylo cuts in. “I haven’t made any progress on that front.”

“It was really nice of you. I mean, you didn’t have to do it, I’m sure you didn’t want to be there any more than I did. Anyway, you can be a really good guy sometimes. When you try. So, you know. Next time you’re wondering if the human suit still fits.”

“Fuck. I say that kind of shit to Phasma in confidence,” Kylo sighs, scrubbing his hand over his face. The scar twinges slightly under his palm, and Rey shakes her head at him.

“Shut up and take your compliment,” she says, and he sighs again. Nods. Pulls his hand away from his face.

“OK. Listen, since you’re feeling all kinds of good feelings towards me today, you want to maybe do me a huge favor?”

 

* * *

 

Kylo doesn’t think he’d miss Hux’s cat, of all things. He doesn’t think he ever particularly liked cats; finicky, contrary creatures. Little predator brains confined to little prey bodies, warm and deceptively soft.

He sees her small, fluffy shape up against the second floor window a few days after Rey’s taken her back, but then the curtain is drawn with her on the other side, and Kylo pulls his keys out of his pocket, gets in the car, and drives to work, to the coffee shop, to the gym.

“So, allow me to untangle this,” says Phasma, finishing her cooldown and taking a large glug from her sports bottle.

“You asked your cousin, who is also your roommate -- and who, by the way, is dating both Poe Dameron _and_ his boyfriend, nice -- to return your hot neighbor’s cat. Which you sort of inadvertently harbored, but didn’t want to admit to doing, because you’ve had a low-grade hate-on for said neighbor for over the past year, which you somehow hoped to resolve by sucking his apparently very nice cock, which I need to hear absolutely no more about, by the way. And then bolting, because you were too chickenshit to say that you got overwhelmed and needed some space, and because his couch is nicer than yours.”

Phasma pauses, and lifts her gaze to the ceiling, considering. “Did I leave anything out?”

“No. And, well, when you put it that way, it all sounds pretty idiotic,” Kylo admits. “Actually, wait, yes. There’s more.”

He’d asked Rey to just knock on the door and leave Millicent on the mat outside, assuring her the cat would be fine for the few seconds it would take Rey to make her escape. Rey listened and nodded, holding the cat tight to her chest, but turned out to have done nothing of the sort.

“I knocked on the door, and he let me in. He was super happy, you don’t even know. He made me tea and everything,” she relayed later that evening, stirring the contents of a casserole dish. “His stuff’s pretty nice. Did you know he has a real coffee table?”

Yes, Kylo knew.

“We should get a real coffee table,” Rey said, and dished up the casserole. It looked suspect, and probably had far too much cheese, but it smelled quite good, and Kylo took a cautious bite, blowing on the hot fork.

“What do we need a coffee table for?” he asked, chewing and swallowing, and Rey shrugged.

“I dunno. To put our feet up on? What do people have coffee tables for?”

“I believe you’re thinking of ottomans,” Kylo said. Rey shrugged again, and glopped more of the cheesy potatoes onto her plate.

“OK, so let’s get one of those, too. And we should really ditch that recliner. I didn’t notice it before, but it has this sort of musty deep smell that clings if you sit in it too long. Oh, I almost forgot. I invited Brendan for dinner next weekend. So, you owe me, like, twice.”

“Finn and Dameron are going to be there, too,” Kylo tells Phasma now with a deep sigh. “That won’t be awkward at all. Not even a little bit.”

“I see. So, how’s the hate-on?”

“It’s kind of less of a hate-on and more like a -- Jesusfuck, I don’t even know. Something I’m probably supposed to have outgrown, or matured beyond.”

“Oh, a schoolgirl crush?” Phasma suggests innocently, and Kylo groans.

“Thanks, Phasma. You’re a great and wonderful friend.”

“Don’t I know it,” she says, and hands him his water.

On Friday after work, Kylo stops by the Trader Joe’s at Rey’s direction, and buys all the things on her list, including a jar of cookie butter and a tub of Triple Ginger Snaps. He’s pretty sure neither are for the dinner she’s planning, and steals a cookie out of the plastic as soon as he’s done in the check-out lane, letting the tangy, spicy-sweet crunch dissolve on his tongue.

The upscale pet supply store is in the same plaza, and Kylo eyes the sign as he puts the groceries into his car. He finds himself walking back across as soon as he’s done shutting the trunk lid, for what, he doesn’t know; the doors slide open with a little chime, and an eerily chirpy associate fixes on him as soon as he is through, leading him to an aisle in the back left.

He listens to her describe three different brands of organic, freeze-dried, all-meat cat treats for far longer than necessary, and ends up buying two packets, stamped with a picture of a leaping panther on the front. He stares at them sitting in his passenger seat, dimly aware that he’s in the middle of doing something stupid; it’s not like the cat is coming back to his place with Hux tomorrow. Still, he resolves, maybe he could fit the treats into Hux’s mail slot, along with his new AAA membership card and this month’s Leadership Brief. The top article in this one is titled Successful Engagement: Communicate, Communicate, and Keep Communicating.

He thinks about it, and calls his mother as he is parking the car. Leia answers on the third ring, like she’s been waiting for it, and he is uncertain, suspended, wondering if it was a mistake as soon as he hears her voice on the other end.

“Hi,” he says. She probably wants to ask if he’s OK, if something terrible has happened, but she doesn’t.

“Hi, Kylo,” Leia says, stumbling over it only a little, and he almost tells her it’s OK if she calls him Ben, but he doesn’t like lying to her if he can help it.

“How are you?” he asks instead, and lets her talk for a long while, not really following every word. He laughs at a joke. Tells her Rey is adjusting just great and not to worry. He knows it means something to her, and hangs on for as long as he can, until she winds down, tells him she loves him, tinny, into his ear.

“Yeah, mom. Yeah,” Kylo says. “I do, too.”

Dinner Saturday is hardly all the things that he dreads. Or maybe it is, and he just tunes it out of his mind, all his attention focused on trying to talk at the right time, smile at the things he’s supposed to smile at. Glance surreptitiously at Hux, at his pale blue button-down, just the collar undone.

Kylo can see his Adam’s apple working as he talks, drinks, swallows, the little hollow at the base of his throat. Hux is usually clean-shaven, smooth, but tonight, he is delightfully stubbled, red giving way to strawberry blond, and Kylo _wants_ , a deep, greedy thump somewhere in the needy, bottomless pit of him; wants to bite at Hux’s prickly chin, to kiss his full, bowed mouth.

Fuck. Jesusfuckingchrist. Fuck.

Poe brings a bottle of wine, of course. Kylo doesn’t know much about wine, but he knows Poe, inasmuch as anyone other than Finn and Rey know Poe, and it’s probably something pretty good, meant to be drunk carefully and slowly, not glugged down in assorted glasses over Rey’s interpretation of spinach and feta tarts. Which, admittedly, turned out extremely well on her second attempt. The less said about her first, the better; he watched her dump them in the trash earlier without a glimmer of reluctance.

Rey sits next to him, Poe across from her, and Finn at the head of the table to Rey’s right. That leaves Hux directly across from Kylo, and Kylo watches his slender, graceful fingers wrap around the stem of his glass, his fork and knife laid properly to the side.

No; scratch all that. It’s exactly everything he was dreading.

Kylo has never imagined he’d be grateful for the existence of Poe goddamn Dameron in his entire life. Poe is chatty, gregarious. He gesticulates with his napkin, tells a myriad hilarious anecdotes, and gets Finn to participate in the epic retelling of their recent escapade involving mistaken identities, a handmade model TIE fighter, and the University’s Robotics lab, which sends Rey into a fit of uncontrollable giggles, and she has to get up and pour herself a glass of tap water to stop.

Finn and Poe finally start getting ready to go after the dishes are soaking in the sink, and Rey throws on her light jacket, clearly heading out with them.

“Don’t wait up,” she says, and winks at him, swiping her keys from the basket on the counter; they shuffle out, an uneven, laughing line, the door clicking closed behind them.

Hux lingers.

Kylo’s palms are starting to sweat. He reaches uncertainly for his pack of cigarettes, his lighter.

“I’m gonna go out on the porch?” he says, half a question, half invitation, and slides open the balcony door, letting the evening chill in.

Hux follows him out and stands close, almost crowding Kylo to the railing. It should be uncomfortable, and Kylo thinks it might be, soon, but he lets out a deep breath and manages to crumple the pack open.

“Shit, it’s my last one,” he says, lighting it up. There’s another pack in his car, but that’s not even close to helpful right this minute.

“I’ll share?” he offers, and turns to face Hux, who is looking at him intently, eyes sweeping up and down his face.

Kylo offers him the cigarette, and points to his scar.

“Do you want to know how I got it?”

“You can tell me, if you want,” Hux says, exhaling a plume of bluish smoke before passing the cigarette back to Kylo. “But in the interest of full disclosure -- your mother already told me.”

“My mother,” Kylo repeats. He really shouldn’t be surprised. Why wouldn’t she have? No need to ask for when; she’s only met Hux once. “What did she say happened?”

Hux looks up and stares at the sky for a long minute, sharp profile limned stark in the evening half-light, and something in Kylo’s chest twinges and pulls, sharp and insistent.

“You wrapped your Harley around a tree,” Hux says, finally looking down.

Kylo doesn’t remember the accident itself very well, only the aftermath in shards and slivers. His arm. His singed sleeve. Blood trickling almost lazily somewhere downward. A patch of sky rapidly shrinking in the lens of his swelling eye. The metal spoke, protruding, sudden and strange, from flesh instead of chrome.

He blinks.

“Did she tell you why?” he asks, but he is sure she didn’t even as he says it. Not even Leia would lay him open like that in front of someone she only just met.

Hux turns to him, lashes fluttering quickly up and down. This close, they look like they’ve been dusted with gold powder, and Kylo wants to reach out, to swipe the pad of a finger over them and see if it comes back smeared sparkling.

“I’m going to take a wild guess,” Hux says, “and posit that you’d been drinking.”

“Lost my license for a year,” Kylo nods, and falls silent. He takes another drag from the cigarette and breathes deep, lets the smoke sink down, curl as far into him as it will go before he lets it out. Hux takes the cigarette back from his loose hand, letting their fingers brush seconds longer than necessary.

“Millie was my wife’s cat, first. She’d picked her out, named her, and everything. I made them write her into the settlement. I don’t even think I wanted her then. I just wanted to take something away from Jess.”

He pauses for an inhale, and breathes out slowly.

“She ran away on me maybe a few months in. Hid in the building basement, which I didn’t figure out for a few days. It felt like a weird sign. Like all the pieces of my reality were being peeled away, just completely, totally gone. I called Jess, left a message on her voicemail, just screaming. Accusing her of doing it, taking Millie back just to spite me, the whole deal. We’ve… pretty much not talked, since.”

“You’re divorced?” Kylo asks. He almost blurts out that none of his gifts from the incompetent gods of the US Postal Service had ever hinted at anything like that, but catches himself just in time. If Hux notices, he doesn’t give any indication.

“Yes. We met in college. Got married right after graduation. It turned out to be a phenomenally stupid thing to have done.”

Kylo has nothing to say to that. Frankly, had he been in the position to marry someone right out of college, it would have meant he’d done a great deal fewer phenomenally stupid things along the way, but he doubts this is anything Hux would want to hear. He leans over and plucks the cigarette from Hux’s hands, stubs it out into the metal railing, then pitches it off of the balcony. Hux moves up after him, brushing invisible lint from his trousers as he goes, and Kylo grabs him by the shoulder, pulls him around so their faces almost touch.

Closing the rest of the distance proves surprisingly easy.

Hux’s stubbled cheek brushes against his, prickly-sharp, but Hux’s mouth underneath is as soft as before, lips slightly wet like he’s been licking them. Kylo presses harder, slides his tongue into Hux’s mouth, lets it drag up the row of his teeth, the inside of his lip. Hux twists in his grip, a hand landing on Kylo’s waist, and deepens the kiss, sucks on Kylo’s tongue gently, tangles his own against it, wet and slick.

Kylo draws back, breaking the kiss to drag his mouth down Hux’s scratchy jaw, nipping lightly at the side of his chin, down his suddenly smooth neck. He licks at the little pulse of vein there, closes his mouth tightly and sucks, feels the hot skin catch under his teeth and soothes at it with a short, quick kiss and then another, working his way to the hollow of Hux’s throat.

He is breathing hard when he finally steps back, and Hux’s eyes look clouded, pupils big and wide; Kylo grabs onto his sleeve and almost drags him back through the sliding door and down the hallway.

“So, this is me,” he says, leading Hux into his bedroom. At least his bed’s made up this time, he thinks, but Hux spares his things only a quick glance before kissing Kylo again, the wiry roughness of his stubble scraping at Kylo’s lips.

OK. Alright. He can work with this. Maybe he isn’t so much to look at, and maybe he’s a mess, for sure, but Hux knows already how good Kylo can be. How good he can make it for him.

He pulls impatiently at the buttons of Hux’s shirt, yanking it open, dragging the sleeves down his shoulders. Hux has a tee on underneath, soft, paper-thin cotton; Kylo pushes it up over his narrow, flat stomach and works at Hux’s belt, pulling the buckle free from the loops, getting his trousers open. He is hard in his briefs already, a spot of wet gathering on the fabric, and Kylo palms him roughly, feeling the stretch of cloth over the hot, thick shape of his dick.

Hux gasps, a breathy little uh-uh wrenching out of his mouth; Kylo hooks his thumbs into the waistband of Hux’s briefs and slides them down, along with the pants, below Hux’s knees.

“Off,” he says, and runs a hand back up Hux’s thigh. He scritch-scratches his nails lightly up the heated skin, drawing a shiver from Hux as he hurriedly obeys, stepping out of his pants and underwear. Rey made everyone take off their shoes at the entrance; he didn’t argue with her then, and he’s certainly not about to complain now.

“This, too,” Kylo says, pointing to the hem of Hux’s shirt. Hux tugs it over his head, and Kylo takes it from him, sets it on top of the rest of his clothes and slides the entire pile off to the side as he takes in Hux, now fully exposed in front of him, cock jutting out, heavy and red, between his freckled thighs.

Kylo hasn’t taken off a thing yet, and he likes this, the couple of inches of height he has on Hux suddenly feeling like so much more.

Hux is thin and wiry, another smattering of freckles dotting his chest, a narrow line of red hair trailing down from the dip of his navel down to where it widens out at the base of his dick. It really is a nice dick, thick and long, precome beading at the swollen, darkened tip, and Kylo thinks he’d like to have it in his mouth again sometime, feel the weight of it on his tongue and sinking down his throat, but not now.

He takes a step back and undoes his own jeans, slowly, pulls his henley off, careful, deliberate. He leaves his boxer-briefs on for now, just gives himself a languid, lazy rub over the front, his dick tenting out the fly, and pushes himself back into Hux’s space, kisses him again, a hot, wet press of his mouth. He angles his hips so he can rut up against Hux’s dick, feeling it catch against his own, and gives a quick bite to Hux’s lower lip before he drags his mouth up to the hot shell of Hux’s ear.

“I want to fuck you,” he whispers heavily, and pulls Hux’s earlobe between his lips, worries at it with the tip of his tongue before he pulls back. “Will you let me?”

“Jesus, Kylo,” Hux drawls; Kylo snakes a hand down his spine and rubs at the top of his ass, grabs a hold of one taut cheek and digs his fingers in a little.

Hux hisses.

“Yes,” he says, “you goddamn beast. Stop pawing at me like you own me,” and Kylo grins, feels his scar pull as he bares his teeth.

“You like it,” he tells Hux and watches his cheeks flood bright pink. “Up on the bed. Open the drawer, right there.”

Hux climbs up onto the quilt and reaches into Kylo’s bedside table, pulls out a condom and the bottle of lube. When he turns around, his face is even redder, his hair falling messy into his eyes, and Kylo slides his underwear off and clambers up on the bed after him, takes the bottle and the little foil packet from his hands.

“Open up for me,” he says, tapping a hand on Hux’s thigh, then the other; Hux lies back on the bed and slides his legs apart, watches Kylo from under long lashes as he untwists the bottlecap, gets his fingers coated in the slick until they’re squelching together wetly. It clings to his skin, viscous, and he slides his fingers against each other, spreading it around. Hux is biting at his own lip, tongue trapped tightly between his teeth when Kylo finally touches him where he wants, a slippery slide underneath his hot, heavy balls, skimming against his hole. Just one at first, the pad of his finger rubbing at the soft, yielding give of it before Kylo sinks it in to the knuckle.

Hux whines, a hitched, bitten-off noise, and clenches tightly around Kylo’s finger. He is as hot on the inside as he is on the outside, and Kylo breathes hard, trying to restrain himself.

“You make the sexiest fucking sounds,” he tells Hux. “You can be loud for me, come on.”

“Fucking get on with it,” Hux grits out instead, trying to regain some control, and Kylo chuckles again and slips in a second finger, scissors them apart, getting him stretched open. He grips his free hand over Hux’s thigh and fingers him hard, rough fast pushes that make a dirty, squelching sound as he works his fingers in and out. Hux whines again and pushes his hips down on Kylo’s hand like he can’t get enough of it and Kylo’s cock twitches against his thigh, where it’s dripping precome steadily, a slimy little pool of it already on the sheets.

He works another finger in, a tighter fit. For a moment, he thinks of giving Hux another, pushing his pinkie in slowly alongside his ring finger. Pictures his thumb working in, almost painfully tight; goddamn, but he wants to see it, his whole hand filling Hux up. He imagines Hux's taut little ass stretched impossibly wide, a hot red blush flooding the pale skin of his face, his chest, as he bites his fat bottom lip and makes those hot broken noises, the whines and gasps that are making Kylo achingly, desperately hard.

Fuck.

He banishes the thought and leans in close, tugs Hux’s legs further apart, pushing his knees towards his chest, and watches the pink, open stretch of his hole as he slides his fingers out. It’s messy, glistening with lube, and Kylo gives it a little pat with the pad of his thumb, feels the hot rim twitching.

He fishes the condom from where he’s set it on the sheet, and presses it into Hux’s hand, closing his fingers around it.

“Come on up here and put it on me,” he says, wondering if Hux will balk, but Hux rips open the packet and moves in. Kylo groans as Hux unrolls the rubber down his dick, hot fingers circling him, and adds more lube, letting it drip down.

“Good,” Kylo praises, and pats Hux’s thigh. “Hands and knees, you ready?”

“Fucking Christ,” Hux says low, like he’s offended Kylo is asking, and goes down easily, the pale span of his ass opening, greedy for Kylo’s dick. Kylo gives himself a quick tug and lines up, gets himself steady up on the bed and pushes down with his hips, impossible heat squeezing him tight as he slides in.

He fucks Hux hard and deep, skin rubbing on skin, feverish and sweaty. He feels the drip of lube down his balls, and cants his hips, changing the angle, until he’s punching a wet gasp from Hux on each stroke, one hand gripping tightly onto a sharp hip, the other reaching down to circle Hux’s neglected cock. It jerks in Kylo’s hand as his fingers brush up its fat length, and he fists his hand, strokes Hux quickly, losing rhythm as he gets closer.

“Kylo. Kylo, oh, fuck, please,” Hux groans, and he is coming, spilling all over Kylo’s hand and the bedspread in thick wet spurts. Kylo fucks him through it, his own hips stuttering, each push becoming jerkier, less coordinated until he is feeling it, balls drawing up tight. He pulls out and snaps the condom off, tosses it to the side and comes all over Hux’s reddened cheeks, the small of his back, painting his pink, freckled skin a thick white.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Hux says again, muffled into the pillow. Kylo sits back on his haunches, breathless, and tries to get the thud of his heartbeat under control.

“Don’t move,” he tells Hux after a few minutes, and goes into the bathroom, comes back with a few wet washcloths and cleans him off, folds the stained blanket down and off the bed.

He stretches out on the bed and draws Hux down with him, sliding an arm under his shoulders. For a few minutes, at least, he feels perfectly content, like nothing can touch him, but he knows it won’t last.

All too soon, he is starting to get uncomfortable, the presence of someone else in the bed after all this time is alien, and sort of wrong. He forces himself to push the feeling down, and adjusts his arm under Hux’s skinny frame, strokes his free hand loosely over Hux’s chest and shoulder.

“So, you should probably know,” he says, trying to sound as normal human as possible. “I am fucking horrible at dealing with people. I don’t really know how to do it. At all. Not in a way that doesn’t eventually put them off. I haven’t stopped drinking. I get obsessive, but I also need a lot of space, and a lot of time to myself. It’s not exactly a winning combination.”

“OK,” Hux says, turning his face towards him on the pillow. “Is this where I tell you something horrible I’ve come to understand about myself? Like how I buy things to make up for a gaping hole in my psyche, or coordinate my pocket squares to match my outlook on the day? Something like that?”

“Fuck you,” Kylo says, but without a lot of feeling behind it, and he keeps dragging his fingers lightly over Hux’s arm like he’s trying to connect the constellations on his skin. “I was being serious. Do you really have mood pocket squares?”

“No. I do like to wear a dark green one when I have to give presentations. It’s my power color,” Hux says, his expression absolutely earnest. He lifts up on his elbows and looks at Kylo, brows drawn.

“Do you need me to leave?”

Kylo considers this, meeting Hux’s stare; he looks tired, but pleasantly loose, eyes a pale, watery green under his ridiculous lashes.

“Yes? No. Maybe? I don’t know,” he says finally. “Can we just -- wait and see how it goes?”

“OK. You can have until -- “ Hux reaches over to the nightstand, rummaging for his phone, “until ten thirty to decide.”

“What happens then?”

“It’s the latest possible time I have to feed Millie,” Hux says. “You can come down with me, or I can go and come back. Or not. Just tell me. I’m a grown man. I can take it.”

“OK,” says Kylo. OK. He can work with that.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [Tumblr here](http://cracktheglasses.tumblr.com/)! Feel free to poke me.


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